2012: Big bucks, bucks, no whammies, STOP!

A Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Mitt Romney with 18 percent of GOP primary voters, followed by Rick Perry at 13 percent and Michele Bachmann at 11 percent. Rudy Giuliani also clocked in double digits with 10 percent.

CAIN: In South Carolina yesterday, Herman Cain announced an economic plan “firmly believing it would drop unemployment to no more than 5 percent, but he acknowledged he was still crunching the numbers,” AP writes. Part of his plan would be a maximum 25% corporate and personal income tax. When asked, Cain couldn’t tell the AP how many jobs he thinks his plan might create, but he said “if we do these things, I am convinced the unemployment rate would be 5 percent or less.”

HUNTSMAN: His campaign hired Adam Piper, who worked for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign and the successful campaigns of several statewide officials, to serve as his political director for the Carolinas, Greenville Online writes.

MCCOTTER: Michigan Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R) wrapped up a four-day tour of Iowa, concluding to the Des Moines Register that the GOP is still interested in meeting new candidates. “Republicans may be prepared at some point to settle, if that’s how they view it, but they’re still viewing it as, ‘Why should we have to? What else is out there?’ It doesn’t mean it’s me,” he said. “The reason I was here was to find out are they even asking that question, ‘What else is out there?’ And they clearly are.”

ROMNEY: As the fundraising quarter comes to a close today, Mitt Romney is the candidate to beat, the AP writes, as he’s expected to report raising between $16 million and $20 million.

Romney will be in Philadelphia today, as President Obama also travels to the city for fundraising events, the Philadelphia Inquirer notes. “Romney planned to drive home his contention that Obama's policies have worsened the recession by also visiting a shuttered Allentown factory the president used in 2009 to tout his $787 billion stimulus legislation.”

“Both President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) are set to do battle Thursday when both visit the southeast Pennsylvania area,” The Hill writes. Except, when’s the Pennsylvania primary again? Just sayin’…

Romney will sign Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)’s “Cut, Cap and Balance” pledge, The Hill reports, meaning Rep. Michele Bachmann is the only candidate not to have said she’ll sign it, besides Jon Huntsman who has sworn off all pledges.

PERRY: “Texas Gov. Rick Perry told a Boy Scouts ceremony on Wednesday that the federal government is rudderless, kicking off a trip to California that has stoked speculation that he will enter the Republican contest for president,” the Sacramento Bee writes. “Just because the federal government happens to be rudderless at the moment, it doesn't mean the American people have lost their way," he said, drawing applause from the audience.

Wading into foreign policy issues, Rick Perry sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder this week “calling plans by pro-Palestinian activists to protest and potentially disrupt Israel's naval blockade of Gaza an ‘unacceptable provocation,’” the Texas Tribune writes.

And a fundraising letter sent by Perry’s state campaign to supporters sent mixed messages, the Austin-American Statesman writes. It asked for donations to Perry’s state committee, which he could not use in a presidential bid, but the letter also set up a blatant contrast between the Texas governor and President Obama.